Formative Assessment: How My District's Personalized Professional Learning Helped Me Up My Game

Hey all! Long time, no type. Let me tell you what has been going on in the Borton world. I am loving my teaching assignment. Freshmen drive me crazy and make me smile every day. I am also a part of an incredible leadership team dedicated to Social Emotional Learning for our district. My part is helping lead at the High School. I am have been learning and growing a lot this year in both positions. Personally, my family has decided to pack-up and relocate to where I teach. For the last 11 years, I have commuted to this incredible district. Here I have been given every opportunity to flourish and grow. I am so thankful for where I teach. So my husband, James, and I made the decision that we want our children to attend a district who makes their teachers feel like that. So, we are building a home here! The entire family is excited to plant some new roots!

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Enough about my life; let's get to the purpose of this blog, formative assessment! Every year, as part of our Individual Career Development Plans, Nevada offers teachers the opportunity to Climb the Mountain. Climbing the Mountain is a Professional Development format in which you engage in research, coaching, data analysis, and reflection as you learn about a personal, professional development goal. I chose to make my goal of making my formative assessment practices less selfish. Formative assessment has always been an essential part of my instructional practice. However, with 130+ students, I often struggled with how to bring students into the conversations in meaningful ways. So, this year, I set out to change that narrative. Below you will find my reflections from the year. I hope you find my journey helpful. I will also link all of the sites I have used to engage my students in data-driven conversations. The critical thing to remember in all of this is that the tool is only as useful as you choose to make it. The depth of the questions, the intention of the data, and the conversations with your students; are things all within your control. When we choose to take even the game-based systems and use the meaningful data behind them, we can engage our students in so much more than fun. We can engage them in deep, meaningful reflective learning. We can also more accurately identify where wholes in understanding might lie.

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My Reflection:

Summer Reflection: This summer, I was gifted the time to begin working on my ICDP via standards-based grading. I started to spend significant time reflecting on my formative assessment practices. My formative assessments have been a cornerstone of my planning process throughout my entire career. I have used them to inform my teaching and ensure students have the learning they need and are prepared before the summative assessment. Still, I know that formative assessments are not just for me. So this year, I am setting a goal to make my formative assessment practices less selfish. I want to use them to inform my instruction and provide my students with beneficial and timely feedback on their current understanding. Timely feedback has always been my limitation with formative assessments due to the number of students I have and the rate with which I would like to provide the formatives. 

To initiate my planning, I did a lot of reading, watching, and thinking about how to maintain HOT formative assessments while still allowing for timely feedback with beneficial feedback. A few resources suggested looking for tech-based tools, and two websites often rose to the surface Formative and EduLastic. When comparing the offerings of the two sites and after sending several emails to Patrick Donovan, it became clear that Formative was better able to meet my assessment style and need for giving timely and valuable student feedback. I also talked with Kristian about my plan and found support there which was validating. 

09/20/21 Update Using my first standard of the year about claims and evidence, I set up my first formative. It has worked incredibly well. The batch grading works better than I imagined, and I have been able to give feedback on essay questions and why specific multiple choice answers were not the best choice. I will be giving students their feedback today in preparation for our first Summative on Wednesday. In the past, my ability to know my students and intuit their readiness via consistent formative practices has led to me an average 10% reassessment rate on summatives. I hope that students will get this feedback; I will be able to give targeted instruction to groups, which will allow for an even higher success rate in the future. I was able to talk with both Meg and Tyler about my progress today and plan for my next steps. 

9/23/21 Update

After the formative assessment given on (9/17), I had about 30% of the students who would have gotten less than a 2 on the summative (required reassessment). I used the program, gave individual feedback, and then went over the assessment with students. I also used the data to help me formulate a review targeted at our weakest understanding points (this is a more typical thing for me). But cluing students to their current understanding, giving them feedback on how to improve, and whole-class interventions mean that at the summative, I only had two students out of the 140 who took it (BioCom and IntSci) that need to reassess. That is 1.5% of the student body. So today in class, we are celebrating with some free time because I want to instill the value of using your formative data to increase learning. Of the two students that did not pass, one was not here for the formative and missed out on targeted feedback. 

Fall Semester Reflection

Individual and group data continue to be a driving force in my classroom. I find that sharing the group data with students has been invaluable. We have been using the data collected through systems in Quizizz, GimKit, GoFormative, and Blooket to look at how students answer various questions. Students then use that information to have me go over what they need before tests or while we are in the middle of learning. I love this form of formative assessment because students are involved in the process. The understanding feels like a partnership between the teacher and the students. We are still working through students wanting to cheat, which I explain skews data and gives me a false perception of their collective understanding. I have appreciated how focusing on how this work is building awareness and serving a purpose is helping students engage more authentically in the process.

Mid-Spring Reflection

A new tool that I just started using is ZipLet. After Patrick shared, I was sold! I have not liked how students "gamed" the canvas discussion boards by posting a phony answer to find correct ones and never honestly shared their thinking. I believe I am now getting a better representation of student ideas. I also love this tool that allows me to quick-launch questions. I embedded it into my Classroom screen, and now I can launch formative assessment questions with a variety of depth at the drop of a hat and display them on the screen for students to discuss our data. I can also run polls through ClassroomScreens. I am enjoying bringing my students into the conversation more. I don't think my idea of what kids know has changed. I have always had a strength in that. However, my students are far more aware of their collective understanding. Individual understanding and goal setting is something I still need to work on. I believe that will work better as I transition to block classes next year. 

Resource:

 Integrated Science Priority Standards

Tech Based Formative Assessment Sites

What is formative data and how do we use it?

Links to the Formative Assessment Tools I use:

https://goformative.com/

https://www.gimkit.com/

https://www.blooket.com/

https://quizizz.com/

https://ziplet.com/

https://www.classroomscreen.com/

Check Out my Tik Tok to See Some Videos on Different Ways I Use the Tools!

BortonScience

SEL Update: What did students have to say about SEL and the Project?

Where have we been and where are we now?

At the beginning of the year, I asked students to define what the different Social-Emotional Competencies meant to them. I did this to help measure my success at integrating Social Emotional Learning and to properly reflect on my students' growth in Social Emotional Learning throughout the year. Initially, most students had little to no understanding of the Social-Emotional Competencies. This did not surprise me as many had previously received little to no learning around the ideas. My original plan was to ask students what the terms meant at the conclusion of the year, but this year has not gone according to plan. I believe we all know that. In fact, the turn of events that have occurred over the last 6 weeks are precisely why I believe SEL is vital to the education of all students. We have all been faced with immense stress and difficult change. Understanding how to care for yourself, communicate needs, problem-solve, etc are more important than ever. Knowing this has led me to be intentional with checking in on my students emotional well-being and taking it into consideration more than ever.

While I am not sure I will ever get the data I was originally planning on collecting, I have decided to share with you the data and reflections of my students from their PBL and SEL integration experience. If you are interested in how I integrated SEL and PBL, I wrote a blog post about it that you may be interested in.

The Data and Analysis

Data: After the end of the project, I asked students to respond to the following question, “What did you learn about the SEL Goals and roles we had as a class?”. I categorized responses according to positive (explained clear benefits of SEL with some elaboration), neutral (simply repeated a single SEL competency or made a short declarative statement), or negative (showed frustration with SEL or did not see value). 70% of students reported a positive experience working with SEL during their project. The quotes are highlighted below. 26% of students responded with neutral statements that were largely declarative in nature. 4% of students showed frustration or saw a lack of value in SEL. These students (quotes included below) were more frustrated with the process I asked them to go through than the actual learning. 

Analysis: Using this data, I would say students successfully grew in their understanding of SEL through this process. At the beginning of the year, I set the goal at 75% of students reporting a greater understanding of SEL. 100% of students who responded to the question above (50 students) showed a greater understanding of SEL even if the statements were neutral or negative. What I am more excited about is that 70% of students saw actual value!

Student Comments:

• I learned that this really makes us reflect on our performance and helps us out by being self aware and helps us be more organized.

• I learned that SEL goals are really helpful. We made goals every day before we worked and were for the most part able to follow them. I believe this helps because it is another step in making you conscious of your decisions. I was in charge of impulse control. As a group I feel that we had some days where we were able to stay completely off our phones but other days we struggled a bit with it. I think that because of being in charge of impulse control I have begun to recognise different ways that I can improve in my life outside of this class and at home.

• I learned that sometimes I just have to listen to others a bit more and follow their lead. I also learned that sometimes I just have to take charge in order to get things done on time.

• That the skills on the posters are important to all interaction with people even outside this class and to me the skills help you think about whats around you and not just yourself.

• It helped me learn how much actually goes into a group project and how much that everyone should contribute.

• I learned that impulse control is very important, and that everyone in my group was very ambitious, and had to work more on self awareness 

• i learned that communication is important when it comes to group projects and its really hard to get a group project done without communication

• I learned that it is sometimes important to set goals for yourself because it helps you stay on task and keep working for something. As my role as a responsible decision maker I learned that we needed to communicate our problems and analyze our situations.  

• I learned a lot about relationship skills. And how to work with different people and how to talk to them and get them to listen to you. I also learned about a little bit of social awareness because when Caleb's brother was sick I knew he didn't want to do anything

• I learned more about communication and how each members ideas are important 

• I learned how to better stay on task using the responsible decision making category. SEL Goals also helped me to understand that not everyone is comfortable talking out loud and we worked around that using the Relationship Skills category. 

• I learned a lot about responsible decision making because there were lots of days where things weren't working out and we had to come up with new ideas and reflect on why it was going wrong. 

• I learned that my job was pretty hard with responsible decision making. For this project sometimes it could be really hard for us so solve the problems with the machine and run more tests. 

• We learned that we need to set goals and then follow them if we actually wanted to get stuff done. I think that our group found that Relationship skills was the poster we found most useful and that we struggled with most. 

Two Frustrated Comments:

• I learned that goal setting can be useful but I thought of it as something that was kinda forced onto us. it is because of this that I don't think that it was very useful and more of a waist of time as we could have used that time to think of what we wanted to get done that day instead of trying to be optimistic. I also think that it is something that you forgot about right after you do it and does not play a big part into every day work that we were doing. However I think that during that time in which you got to reflect on what you did yesterday and how you could improve on it the next day.

• Nothing

I hope you continue to journey with me through my SEL journey!

Connecting with Students Virtually

For the last couple of weeks, we have been asked to provide extensions of learning rather than new content. This was to ensure equitability which I 200% agree with.

Still, I missed my kids and wanted a chance to check in with students “face to face” who have the opportunity. I sent out emails with a google hangout invitation and an explanation of what we are going to do.

Week One: We did a KAHOOT! It was so easy to do this with students. Simply choose the game, share your screen and go just like normal. Some of my students decided to use their phones and Chromebooks, but many stuck to one device. Doing a Kahoot was nice because it felt normal. In my opinion, the tastes of normal are just what we all need for our Social-Emotional Health.

Week Two: I created a Science Scattergories Google Slide. I told students that they would need a pencil and a paper. To score, I had students share their entire list and had anyone with the same word jump in and mention it. Warning, some of the ideas are less scientific than I like…but it lead to good conversations. What are energy sources? What is an abiotic thing? Does phosphorus start with an F? You get the idea! In the future, I would like to make more lists as I believe this is something I can do with students. Couldn’t it be a fun review? I am thinking about the rock cycle and rock identification lists. MUAHAHAHA. Below I included my Slides. Feel Free to copy them and use them. The way I see it, we are all in this Covid-19 learning journey together. I have been scared, overwhelmed, in tears, and smiling…so a free resource seems like a small thing I can do to help others. Have a beautiful day.

Science Scattergories The name of the game is to think of a word for each prompt that starts with the letter rolled. But if you think of the same word as someone else... no points for you!

Link to the Presentation Here.

Make a copy and enjoy it!

Social Distancing: 7 Lessons I hope to Keep Forever

If you told me that I would voluntarily stay home with my three beautiful children, two dogs, and my loving husband for an indefinite amount of time, I would have laughed out loud. Being home is not easy for me. Limited social interaction leads me to visit public places and strike up conversations. I am not joking. But here we are being asked to practice social distancing. The local and federal government has implored us to stay home and limit our interactions with others. Ever the rule follower, we have obliged.

In all honesty, my family’s choice to stay home extends beyond rule-following. It comes down to social obligation. How can I, as a person dedicated to teaching students about global citizenship, not place the needs of others above my own?

In the mess of the last two weeks, we have experienced ear infections, cast removal, and the loss of our beloved, 11 yo bulldog. We have also relished in two birthdays, more family time than ever, cooking together, and hours of connecting with friends and family over video chat. To say that the last two weeks have been riddled with blessings and curses is close to an understatement.

Still, I am choosing to share with you (and my future self) seven lessons that I hope to keep with me when this is all said and done.

1. Family time doesn’t have to be big to be magical. It can be simple too. I think because I am a working Mom, I tend to place huge amounts of pressure on myself to make things extra special. Friday night movies often included BYO pizza and DIY snack mix. The movie was new and the snacks were on point. Those nights are wonderful and memorable. But so are evenings spent with a bubble machine in the driveway or a racetrack on the sidewalk or coloring Mommy-made coloring sheets. I need to remember that sometimes there is beauty in simplicity. That applies to several areas of my life and family time is one of them.

2. Hanging out with friends doesn’t have to require a babysitter. The amount of times friends and I have put off hanging out because of logistics is immense. We are all busy people with lives packed full of wonderful and beautiful things. But Covid 19 has helped us all learn that a video chat works for heart-to-hearts, games, and good laughs! When life doesn’t allow you to physically be together, I want to remember that technology allows you to do it virtually.

3. Grandparents might just like to watch kids play. Our family lives in Michigan. Which means we have about 10 hours keeping us from a quick trip to Grandma’s house. I used to look for reasons to video call James and my parents. But social distancing has shown me that grandparents might just like to watch short glimpses of their grandbabies employing their brilliant, chaos. I want to remember that living life is enough reason to connect. No one expects my house to be cleaned or my kids to perfectly behave. The people who love my kids might just be happy watching them in their everyday habitat.

4. Take time to learn when you find yourself with the opportunity. Not being at school with my students has been hard for me. I miss them terribly. I know that other teachers feel the same. But that is a reality that I cannot control. What I can control is embracing the extra time as an opportunity to learn. With my extra time, I have gotten to play with different technologies available to my teaching that I would not normally have the time to do. I have learned how to make a Kapp (kinda app) through google slides and virtual break out through play.toys. I have also played with breakout.edu, Craftspace, Boom Cards, etc. Why? Because I figure that this is my chance to grow professionally and I don’t want to miss it.

5. Sometimes you may have your kids on educational apps or doing at-home learning. Other days they may watch a few too many episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Both are ok. This is important to me. I am a driver. At first, I set up a schedule, learning, recess, crafts, cooking, etc. But last night, my 5-year-old cried because he was so tired. When we asked him why he talked about all he had been learning and begged for a day to just watch some shows. How did I miss that my sweet babies need downtime too? Today, that is what I am giving them and we are all better for it. I want to remember that learning and growing can look a million different ways and not all of them have to be formal.

6. I need to do less. Yeah. I know. People who love me have told me this forever. Sometimes I treat myself like a machine that can manage to push out a product no matter the strain. But this forced time to slow down, engage with my family has shown me that some things have to go. I do not want to miss kitchen dance parties because I have another email to write. I refused to miss any more Saturday morning cuddles because of another commitment. My family deserves more. I deserve more. So…I need to do less.

7. Doing less does not mean giving up dreams. The driver in me hates the truth in number 6. It feels like giving up. Still, the last thing that I want to take away from this crazy time is that doing less is not giving up dreams, but rather ensuring the stuff I am choosing to do works to bring those dreams closer. It is about prioritization. In a conversation with friends last night, we were all challenged to think about who we wanted to be at 68. Spouting off my dreams of being an engaged mentor at church, grandmother, and possibly an educational influencer, I realized something simple. Right now, I need to invest in where I want to be in the tomorrows to come. That investment means that sometimes I have to say no.

I hope you are taking a few moments to reflect on this time as well. I know that there is so much still unknown. I know there are still so many things to grieve (loss of freedom, loss of plans, loss of connection, loss of freedom). But I also know that some much-needed lessons are coming out of this adventure and I don’t want to miss that. Stay well, sweet friends. Wash your hands. Social distance, but stay connected!

Project Based Learning and Social Emotional Learning Jobs

I love Project Based Learning. I believe giving students authentic, engaging, and difficult experiences are a gift. Why? Because I see how students learn and grow through the experience. It is amazing.

So when I got myself ready for another PBL opportunity, I reflected on how to increase 100% student engagement in the project. I am always looking for a way to build in accountability and opportunities for all students to equally engage in the work. In the past, I have given students jobs, but my concern was always about the value to students. PBL is not about busy work, it is about authentic learning that simultaneously builds soft skills. Was timekeeper meeting that goal? I wasn’t so sure.

So, with this in mind, I contacted our Instructional Guide, Meg Frideres, for a coaching conversation (simple plug for the power and value of dialogical coaching). We set down to talk about how I could promote social-emotional learning explicitly within the project. Through our conversation, I decided to make the PBL jobs directly tied to the SEL Competencies. What if instead of a person who keeps the papers, we had a student reflecting on the group’s ability to remain socially aware?

Now in order to make the jobs valuable, I knew I needed to have students reflect on the competencies often and intentionally. Here is a description of the jobs as introduced to students.

In order to facilitate the reflection, I created reflection books for each job. Students will be asked to complete the reflections at the end of each day students work in groups. Will this take time? Yes. Will it help students really think about their ability to meet the SEL competencies? Yes. To me, this meets the goals for PBL. Below, I included an example of what is in the guide.

To introduce the jobs, I showed this video. I wanted to honor kids and recognize that sometimes group work sucks, but it doesn’t have to.

Next, we had a little fun. Students were given their first challenge as collaborative teams.

Students were SO engaged. It was awesome! Were they working collaboratively, not completely, but that is what made the task so perfect. I wanted students to have an experience that they could reflect on. Cue the next step of the introduction…

I gave students time to reflect individually, collaboratively, and then identify a goal to share whole class. i was blown away by the honesty in the students’ reflection. They are definitely spending time analyzing the competencies and I am excited to see how this intentionality on my part will help them. If I want students to be world changers, I have to give them opportunities to develop the critical skills.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!

Above is how I organized the group reflections. I chose to color code groups and keep the folders to ensure they are always in class and available. This also allows me to provide feedback on our SEL learning targets for the project.

Getting my students started with Social Emotional Learning...

This summer, I was thankful to attend a CASEL leadership conference in Chicago with colleagues from multiple levels. As a previous instructional coach for the last 3 years I have heard so much about the importance of SEL implementation, but this was my first chance to dig in and really think about how I might implement it in my classroom.

To be honest, I found myself constantly overwhelmed about adding just one more thing. I believe, at my core, in the value of science learning. Could I really take more time to do something else?!

The answer is yes because no. Yes, I can take the time to do one more thing because no it isn’t going to distract from my teaching. Instead, SEL is there to partner with my instruction to build essential skills in students and make them aware of the skills. It is not one more thing. It is the thing that gives context and value to what I am doing with students.

It is not one more thing. It is the thing that gives context and value to what I am doing with students.

The next question, what does this look like? Well…it looks like taking the time to pause and reflect on things being done in class through the lens of the competencies. These do not have to be long discussions, but they do have to be intentional ones. To better facilitate the discussion and remind me to make time for it, I created the posters below. I will mention how I introduced them to students later.

I started my new year in a new position as a high school teacher on maternity leave. Not the best timing, I know. Not wanting to wait to build some SEL skills until I return, I asked my friend, colleague, and instructional coach, Meg Frideres to work with my students on what we called Mindfulness Monday. Meg is a mindfulness guru in our district and worked on mindful breathing, positive thinking, gratitude, and mindful listening with students.

Now that I am back, I am using the skills Meg worked on with my students as we develop our SEL goals and prepare for meaningful discussions around the competencies. Disclaimer: I did choose to spend some time on creating goals with students around SEL for science. Yes…that is time I am not technically teaching science standards. BUT I believe taking time to do this will improve the efficiency in my classroom. I suppose time will tell…

Here is the process I took for the Goal Setting:

Step One: Establish a baseline. To do this, I created a google form based on the CASEL leadership competency self-reflection. Here is what it looked like…

Step Two: Students were asked to complete the survey thoughtfully while in class and then use their responses to complete the reflection below.

Step 3: On the next day, I started the class asking students to define the competencies as they know them. Students responded on notecards which I have filed away for them to reflect on later in the year.

Step 4: To ensure the coming mindful conversations were productive, I gave students 15 minutes to respond to the four questions below on a separate piece of paper. As you can see, students were provided sentence stems to start their thinking.

Step 5: We reviewed Mindful Listening and added in paraphrasing. After talking with Meg, we thought the best skill to help students wrap up their thinking would be for the listener to paraphrase the overall message from the speaker. Knowing this was a new skill, I first modeled for my students. I did this by asking a single student to come up and talk for one minute of one of two topics: “Best college football team in the country” or “Best Ice Cream Flavor ever invented”. Finally, to ensure students were comfortable paraphrasing their partner’s thoughts, I had them practice twice. Once with the “Best Movie Ever Recorded” and another time with “Their Weekend Plans”. By the time students had observed the modeling and practicing, they were able to see the value in paraphrasing as helping them as a listener stay focused and as a speaker have a summary of their thoughts.

Step 6: The Discussion. This was key. First, I gave students examples through my own personal goal. Students need to see that we are not only asking them to improve but also we are committed to improving ourselves. So I talked about my need for Self-management, more specifically impulse control. Students were asked to talk for one minute, 3 times. I included the slides that facilitated this process and asked them to reflect below.

Step 7: I let students know that they would be conference with me about their goals next week (possibly another blog post?)

Step 8: Using the posters. After we were all said and done, I asked students to use the posters to explain to me what examples of the competencies we were doing by engaging in goal setting and mindful listening/paraphrasing. Students had amazing ideas and most of them noted that all competencies were hit on in these activities.

Reflecting…

Overall, things went really well. I enjoyed hearing students insights into themselves and each other. There was, of course, the struggle with immaturity and discomfort, but students handled it well with gentle and not so gentle reminders. My last period of the day struggled most with the activity. I am still trying to figure out how I can best meet their needs and ensure the best learning experience for them all.

In the future, we are going to continue drawing our collective attention to the competencies. Having conversations around them and in the future using them to set goals as a class.

I am so excited about this journey and I cannot wait to keep you all in the loop!